What does high fidelity mean when referring to the reproduction of sound through devices having certain minimum required characteristics.
Hi-Fi stereo systems
High fidelity is defined as the predisposition of some specific equipment to reproduce sound accurately.
High fidelity devices are called upon to carry out their task whenever a sound wave must be recorded, transmitted or amplified.
In all these operations the acoustic signals are converted into electrical signals, treated differently depending on whether it is transmission, recording or amplification, to be transformed into acoustic signals capable of reproducing, as realistically as possible, the original ones.
To perform all these steps, various types of equipment are needed, connected together in more or less complex chains of devices capable of providing a perfect correspondence between the input and output signals.
This represents an ideal goal, impossible to achieve but used as a goal to try to get as close as possible.
All the devices that make up a high fidelity system, often also called a "hi-fi" system, using the English abbreviation "high fidelity", have the same importance in helping to achieve the final result, bearing in mind however the hierarchy criterion of the source, according to which the device that is upstream should always be slightly better than the one that is downstream, if for example you try to connect a poor source, cd player or other, to an amplification system and speakers capable of providing more transparency to sound, the end result would be to enhance all the defects of the source, with consequent degradation of reproduction.
The characteristics that a high-fidelity system must have are strictly connected with the attributes of sound waves that a normal human ear is able to perceive, precisely height, intensity and timbre, corresponding respectively to the frequency, amplitude and shape of the sound wave.
Each component must therefore carry the signal from its input to that of the next, respecting the attributes of the sound in the best possible way.
The main technical data that best define the quality of a certain component are frequency response, which is the ability to reproduce in a linear way the wide range of frequencies between 20 and 20000 Hz, distortion, dynamics, background noise and separation stereo of the two channels.
